Retailers generally attempt to maximize profits or other performance metrics such as sales volume through different types of retail strategies. In order to gain more customers and keep current customers, retailers are investing more and more into strategies to provide an assortment of products that meets customers' unique behaviors, needs and expectations. For example, retail assortment planning is a strategy used to specify a set or an assortment of products carried by a brick and mortar retailer or by an online retailer that meets the customers' preferences in products. The retail assortment planning may encompass selecting an assortment of products to offer for sale that would maximize the performance metric.
However, despite engaging in retail assortment planning, retailers regularly lose volume and profits on unpopular products existing in the assortment of products. This is because of the difficulty in determining how the addition or deletion of a product or a multitude of products affects the overall performance metric, such as profits or sales volume, of an assortment of products. Moreover, it is difficult to determine how the addition or deletion of a product affects the performance metric of each individual product in the assortment of products.